Nuance Communications Acquires Maryland-based Language and Computing

According to Maryland-based Language and Computing, Nuance Communications has acquired the company from its private equity firm, Gimv NV.

By Mike Hackmer | March 8, 2010

According to Maryland-based Language and Computing, Nuance Communications has acquired the company from its private equity firm, Gimv NV.

Nuance, a market leader in speech-driven clinical documentation and communication, acquires "key technologies and researchers from Language and Computing, Inc." Language and Computing has been a pioneering developer of clinical narrative processing technology as well as a provider of "natural language processing and natural language understanding technology solutions," according to the company’s website.

Nuance, with more than 5,000 customers worldwide in the healthcare industry, made the acquisition to integrate Language and Computing’s natural language processing technologies into its broader healthcare suite of solutions. With the goal of moving more healthcare data to electronic health records, the acquisition of Language and Computing’s technology provides Nuance with even more tools to convert critical healthcare data into more usable formats. The added technology gives Nuance an even stronger position in the healthcare industry, especially since a large percentage of healthcare data is unstructured.

"Natural Language Processing adds meaning to the clinical narrative, so that clinicians’ spoken words are not simply transformed into text, but can be used to create meaningful clinical data that can be inserted into an EHR or other data repositories without forcing doctors to document via time consuming and restrictive point-and-click templates," said John Shagoury, executive vice president for Healthcare, Nuance, in that company’s press release on the acquisition. "By adding these new Natural Language Processing technologies and capabilities, Nuance has advanced its commitment to improve the clinical documentation process for healthcare organizations by extending the power of our speech-driven solutions that cater to both to clinicians’ documentation preferences and provider organizations’ need to create structured data within their EHRs."

News of the acquisition comes as Nuance also announced a strategic partnership with Massachusetts General Hospital.

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